Many professional photographers claim no one could make a living selling images for $1.00 to $2.00, but there are always exceptions. At 28, Yuri Arcus is the world's top selling microstock photographer and has a good chance of reaching his aspiration of earning $1 million from stock photography before he is 30.
He was born and lives in Aarhus, Denmark, lived in the U.S. as a child, and started producing microstock in late 2005. He has about 5,500 unique images in microstock, produces approximately 300 new images per month and makes over 500,000 microstock sales per year. He sees his pictures in magazines and newspapers daily. About 95% of his images have sold at least once. Assuming an average gross sale price of $2.00 for a microstock usage (he only gets a percentage), his current annual microstock revenue would be more than $400,000.
In addition, approximately 20% of his annual income comes from selling RF through Alamy.com and several other traditional agencies. Typically, RF is sold at a variety of price points, so there should be no conflict selling the same images as microstock, as well as traditional RF. Arcus believes microstock does as well as macrostock because the pictures are often brighter and more colorful.
Before he went into microstock Arcus tried selling RF through traditional agencies at the higher price points, but basically sold nothing. While some microstock photographers work exclusively for one distributor, Arcus contends "exclusivity is too risky." If an exclusive agency bans his account, he says it could end his microstock business. Similarly, he isn't interested in producing RM imagery on an exclusive basis, since he feels the return per image would be too low.
Currently, his work is represented by: Dreamstime, Istockphoto, Shutterstock, Crestock, Bigstock, Fotolia, Stockxpert, 123Rf, Snapvillage, Canstock, Photostockmedia, Scanstockphoto, imagecatalog, NewDarkroom and USphotostock. He'll also put his images on three new sites presently in a pre-launch phase. His highest producers are Shutterstock and iStock, which deliver about equal revenue. Then, the best producers in order are: Fotolia, Stockxpert, Dreamstime, Photospin and 123rf.
During an average production day, Arcus will shoot 1,300 raw images, but edits tightly. On a good day, he ends up with 40 to 50 pictures satisfactory for submission. He's also studying psychology and philosophy at the University of Aarhus and will receive his bachelor's degree soon. Before university, he worked as a freelance journalist for a youth magazine and had his own graphic-design company.
About 30% of his images are shot in a 275-square-foot studio. He has two full-time assistants and 14 part-time staff. He specializes in big scale "on location" shoots, like closing down the Scandinavian Casino Royal for a day to shoot model-released gambling pictures. Or, he'll set up a shoot of a music concert with attendees signing model-releases so he can sell crowd surfing or crazy fan pictures as stock.
Previously, Arcus was the primary shooter for two highly regarded model agencies in Copenhagen. Most models consider working with him a plum assignment. To find models, he often spends up to $2,000 to market big casting events. Models need to do two shoots for free to allow him to see how well their images will sell. He works with five core models who are paid $70 per hour and has 15 other models he works with regularly. One model is a professional soccer-player and another is "semi-famous" in Denmark. His gross annual model expenses are about $20,000.
Does he see any leveling in the number of downloads, due to the huge growth in both the number of microstock photographers and images? He says there is no leveling in demand, but there could be a drop in individual income, due to the extreme growth of aspiring microstock photographers.
"Ironically, microstock is becoming more of a closed community," Arcus says. "Everyone can submit pictures, but the standards for acceptance are rising. Many photographers find the microstock quality requirements and digital standards higher than at macrostock, despite the lower fees for usage."